Biography

Jewish Austrian composer.

Largely self-taught.
Only counterpoint lessons with the composer Alexander Zemlinsky.
Schoenberg was also a painter, an important music theorist, and an influential teacher of
composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern and later John Cage.
His habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde
musical thought throughout the 20th century.
Both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler recognized Schoenberg's significance as a
composer.
Strauss turned to a more conservative idiom in his own work after 1909, and at that point
dismissed Schoenberg.
Mahler adopted him as a protg and continued to support him, even after Schoenberg's
style reached a point Mahler could no longer understand. Mahler worried about who would
look after him after his death.
Second Viennese School. They included Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Hanns Eisler, all
of whom were profoundly influenced by Schoenberg.
******The First Viennese School is a name mostly used to refer to three composers of the
Classical period in Western art music in late-18th-century Vienna: Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. (Franz Schubert is occasionally added
to the list).

Wife
In October 1901, he married Mathilde Zemlinsky, the sister of the conductor and composer
Alexander von Zemlinsky,
His first wife died in October 1923, and in August of the next year Schoenberg married
Gertrud Kolisch (18981967), sister of his pupil, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch (Neighbour
2001; Silverman 2010, 223).

13 & Death
Schoenberg's superstitious nature may have triggered his death. The composer had
triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13), which possibly began in 1908 with the
composition of the thirteenth song of the song cycle Das Buch der Hngenden Grten
Op. 15 (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96). Moses und Aron was originally spelled Moses und
Aaron, but when he realised this contained 13 letters, he changed it.
He feared he would die during a year that was a multiple of 13.
He died on Friday, 13 July 1951, Schoenberg had stayed in bed all day, sick, anxious and
depressed.

3 Period
First period: Late Romanticism
The first of these periods, 18941907, is identified in the legacy of the high-Romantic
composers of the late nineteenth century, as well as with "expressionist" movements in
poetry and art.
Beginning with songs and string quartets written, Schoenberg's concerns as a composer
positioned him uniquely among his peers, in that his procedures exhibited characteristics
of both Brahms and Wagner.
Schoenberg's Six Songs, Op. 3 (18991903), for example, exhibit a conservative clarity of
tonal organization typical of Brahms and Mahler, reflecting an interest in balanced phrases
and an undisturbed hierarchy of key relationships.

Second period: Free atonality

During the summer of 1908, his wife Mathilde left him for several months for a young
Austrian painter, Richard Gerstl. This period marked a distinct change in Schoenberg's
work.
The second, 19081922, is typified by the abandonment of key centers, a move often
described (though not by Schoenberg) as "free atonality".
Schoenberg's music from 1908 onward experiments in a variety of ways with the absence
of traditional keys or tonal centers.

His first explicitly atonal piece was the second string quartet, Op. 10, with soprano. The
last movement of this piece has no key signature, marking Schoenberg's formal divorce
from diatonic harmonies.

Third period: Twelve-tone and tonal works

The third, from 1923 onward, commences with Schoenberg's invention of dodecaphonic,
or "twelve-tone" compositional method.
Twelve pitches of the octave are regarded as equal, and no one note or tonality is given
the emphasis it occupied in classical harmony. He regarded it as the equivalent in music of
Albert Einstein's discoveries in physics.

Arnold Schoenberg, self-portrait, 1910

He suggested that distinction between consonance and dissonance is illusory.

Arnold Schoenberg and the Ideology of Progress in Twentieth-Century Musical Thinking.
Schoenberg's best-known ideas on the development of music are probably those having to do
with the expansion of chromaticism during the nineteenth century and the "emancipation of
the dissonance" in the twentieth
He presented the view that consonance and dissonance do not constitute contradictory
qualities, as had been thought by many generations of theorists.

As far as Schoenberg is concerned, the twelve-tone technique was aimed at solving a practical
problem of composition: how to establish a new musical order in response to the so-called
"collapse of tonality.

Arnold Schoenberg's Suite for Piano (German: Suite fr Klavier), Op. 25, is a twelve
tone piece for piano composed between 1921 and 1923.
Schoenberg's Suite has six movements:
1
Prludium (1921)
2
Gavotte (1923)
3
Musette (1923)
4
Intermezzo (19211923)
5
Menuett. Trio (1923)
6
Gigue (1923)
A performance of the entire Suite fr Klavier takes around 16 minutes.